1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sound source localization apparatus and a sound source localization method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, robot technology has rapidly progressed and more and more robots such as humanoid robots work with humans. For practical use of the robots, “robot audition” has attracted great attention and various proposals have been made (for example, see K. Nakadai et al., “Active Audition for Humanoid”, in Proc. of 7th National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2000), pp. 832-839, 2000). Sound source orientation, that is, estimation of sound source localization, is one of the most fundamental processes for robot audition. The subsequent processes such as sound source separation and speech recognition are induced from the results of the sound source localization.
A multiple signal classification (MUSIC) method is one sound source localization sound orientation method used in real world application examples such as robots. The MUSIC method has a merit in that it is easier to detect peaks of the spatial spectrum when compared with other known methods.